As part of ongoing research on Late Pleistocene adaptations in New York, the NYSM is renewing its commitment to the statewide fluted point survey begun in the 1950s by Dr. William A. Ritchie. To all NYSAA members and others interested in New York prehistory, please help us systematically record data on Paleoindian fluted and lanceolate projectile points for the NYPID Project.

To contribute to the NYPID Project, visit the links in the left navigation panel of this page.

Background

Paleoindian fluted points from the
NYSM Archaeology Collections

NYPID -- it's not a state agency -- it's a research project! Our goal is to compile information and digital photographs of artifacts left behind by the first peoples of New York.

Over 50 years ago, Ritchie published Traces of Early Man in the Northeast (1957). This landmark study synthesized discoveries of Paleoindian points and sites to interpret the Late Pleistocene occupation of New York and beyond. In 1982, Beth Wellman and Bob Funk updated Ritchie's work with data supplied by professional and avocational archaeologists, providing the only dedicated survey of fluted points for New York (Wellman 1982). Beth Wellman showed that fluted bifaces clustered in the Hudson and Susquehanna valleys, the Ontario Lake Plain, and other parts of New York, suggesting travel corridors and key resource areas for Paleoindians.

While statewide Paleoindian point surveys are not new, archaeologists are increasingly using these data as another tool for understanding life in the Late Pleistocene. The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) website (http://pidba.utk.edu/) shows how fluted point distributions can be used at a continental scale to help address questions on the peopling of the New World (e.g., Anderson and Faught 1998; Anderson et al. 2005). Although data quality for many states on this website is excellent, it is incomplete for some states like New York, handicapping interpretations.

In the last two decades, archaeologists have developed sequences for fluted and lanceolate Paleoindian points on a timescale of about 13,000 to 10,000 BP (Ellis and Deller 1997; Bradley et al. 2008). With these seriations, we can assign rough ages to undated Paleoindian sites and point finds in the Great Lakes and New England. Coupled with provenience data, this can tell us much about how and when Paleoindians colonized and adapted to these broad regions; the same can be done for New York.